Beware Latest CCleaner update

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I just posted this on the tenforums.com SOftware & Apps message board:

HE LATEST CCLEANER INSTALLS AVAST SOFTWARE EVEN IF YOU TELL IT NOT TO

Yesterday I downloaded and installed the latest CCleaner installer. When I ran it I was careful to uncheck the option to install the Avast ant-malware software. THe installation ran fine and everything seemed OK. I later ran CCleaner and it also seemed to run OK.

Today when I started my system I got a small popup message from Avast saying something. When I saw the message I clicked it off immediately since I didn’t know what it might be doing to my system. Then I ran the Autoruns utility to see what Avast software had been loaded onto my system. This was the result:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S41wOwXprn3TEv67aw7DNMMAimhWFCOn/view?usp=sharing

Scary business indeed. I unchecked as many of the entries as I could to prevent them from loading at boot time. I figured after doing that and rebooting I’d be able to clean them out. But Autoruns could not uncheck many of the Services entries even though it was running in Admin mode, and when I rebooted my system failed to boot because it said my boot drive was invalid.

At that point I decided to give up trying to delete Avast (I’ve been through that hassle before and didn’t want to repeat it) and simply restored my boot drive from a recent Macrium backup I have saved on an offline external drive. Now, even though I like CCleaner because of the various options it has I won’t be upgrading it ever again.

2

Using the slim build of CCleaner I’ve never had Avast or toolbars installed https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/builds

I did receive some popup ad’s in CCleaner on some systems though that only lead to CCleaner and Avast being removed from those systems forever.

3

I would advise anyone to do a Custom install of CCleaner whenever updating to new version.

4

I’d go one step further and suggest that you always use the custom option no matter what you install.
You should also have unchecky running in the background as some extra protection.